Scales
by Altariel
Summary: "He went down to the butts for the rest of the morning, placing arrow after arrow faultlessly in the gold." Faramir, Amrothos, and Denethor.
1. Scales

**Scales**

_Minas Tirith, summer, 3006 TA_

There were surely not many twenty-three-year-old junior officers who would patiently countenance the near constant presence of a twelve-year-old boy, but Faramir, on leave for the weeks around Midsummer, found himself in the possession of such an acolyte, and was handling the situation with considerable aplomb. His uncle Imrahil's third son, Amrothos of Belfalas, having attached himself to Faramir at the start of the holiday, had shown no particular inclination to let go. Amrothos, a bookish creature whom his father had decided would not be sent to war, had clearly decided that his cousin was a kindred spirit, and wherever Faramir went that summer, Amrothos went too.

He tagged along everywhere: to the library, on walks, listening into conversations at the many formal occasions that cluttered up the season; he even came along to watch Faramir train, although he plainly thought that these activities were largely a waste of time that could be used for more interesting and profitable pursuits. Of course, there had been a few sly comments from some quarters, not least fellow officers who resented the Steward's son's rapid rise through the ranks. Faramir dealt with these quietly, promptly, and efficiently.

"Treat the boy with respect. Or you'll answer to me."

And since the second son – whatever his own odd predilection for, well, _books_ – also had a reputation for being fast, effective, and extremely sneaky, people let the matter drop. (Besides, it was worth remembering that the Steward's older son could hit very hard, and Amrothos was his cousin too.) After that, whenever Amrothos came to watch his cousin spar or shoot, he was treated rather like a mascot; people ruffled his hair or asked him what he was reading now. Amrothos would answer these questions precisely – more precisely, perhaps, that his interlocutors anticipated. Faramir left him to get on with it. The sight of one of his fellow lieutenants, who bitterly resented Faramir's imminent promotion, having some arcane point of geometry explained to him in considerable detail, was a quiet pleasure that would, in the next few months, carry him through the difficult start to his captaincy, a period during which he struggled to assert his authority over the Ithilien company, who had little time for crisp and standoffish young lords set on shaking up every aspect of their operations.

The simple fact was that Faramir liked his cousin. He found the boy's company both soothing and stimulating. Amrothos was interested in everything: history, poetry, art, music, nature, stonework, metalwork… (There was a period, later, when he was about seventeen, where he took up knitting, to explore the tensile strengths of various types of yarn. After that he turned to ropemaking.) After several days intensely watching Faramir shooting at the butts, Amrothos calmly offered his notes on his cousin's technique. Faramir, thinking he might as well, tried his suggestions the following day to extremely satisfying effect. Altogether, they rubbed along quite well – and Faramir was human enough too to find it rather pleasant to be the object of hero worship for a change. Usually everyone was falling over to commend themselves to his brother. Amrothos seemed to think Boromir was slightly strange in his obvious delight in arms and his complete lack of interest in reading.

"Rather a one-track mind, if you ask me," he sniffed at one point during this time, and Faramir had to leave the room to compose himself.

In truth, it would not have been much of a holiday without his young cousin's company. The weather was unpleasantly hot, the rounds of formal duties ate up hour after hour, and he was tired from a long tour in south Ithilien. Most of all, the promotion was weighing heavily on his mind. Faramir had the strong suspicion that his father doubted he was up to it. (Boromir, when he raised his reservations, yawned, shrugged, and said, "Oh, you'll be fine." Which, while gratifying, was also entirely unhelpful.) Spending time listening to Rothos chatter on about whatever was filling his extremely well-stocked young mind was, on the whole, very restful. On the whole.

One hot morning about a week after Midsummer, Faramir found himself with a day blissfully free of any specific duties, and took the rare chance to sleep in. It was a measure of both his love for Rothos and his own near-limitless reserves of patience when, woken by an insistent tapping at the door, and hearing his cousin call his name, he didn't throw his boots across the room and curse every single member of his blasted family but, instead, called out to Rothos to wait for him. He lay for a moment staring bitterly at the sunlight, then rolled out of bed, hastily washed and shaved, pulled on his clothes and went in search of the boy.

He was not in the library, reading. He was not in the kitchen, scrounging. Nor was he in the garden, blowing something up. "Well," muttered Faramir, "let us try a more laborious search method." He went upstairs, to the second floor, and began, one by one, to check the rooms. Mostly, they were empty. Once upon a time, perhaps, the Stewards had welcomed large parties of guests, but not under his father's jurisdiction. Coming down onto the first floor, he went to the back of the house to check his own rooms again (it would be just his luck to be going around in circles), and then back along the corridor. When he heard music coming from one of the rooms there, he guessed he had found his quarry.

Faramir opened the door. Inside, Amrothos was sitting on a wooden chest, plucking away at an _oud_. The noise was not particularly tuneful.

"Rothos," Faramir said. "What are you doing?"

The boy looked up at him, plainly very frustrated. "I can't get the tuning right!"

Any other child, Faramir reflected, would be simply bashing away at the thing. Not Rothos. Of course Rothos knew how to play the _oud_. Faramir went in, pushing the door shut behind him, and sat down in a rather shabby armchair opposite his cousin. "The tuning?"

"Well, _listen_!"

He played a few notes. Something sounded odd. "It's… not the sweetest sound I ever heard, no."

"I don't understand!" Rothos plucked away a little more. "Wretched thing…"

Faramir, resting his head back on the chair, watched as his cousin kept on experimenting. After a while, Rothos started to get something from the instrument that sounded closer to music. He really was very clever, Faramir reflected. And he had all the time in the world – to practice, to study, to learn, to explore… Faramir, looking down at his hands, which were flecked with tiny scars, flexed them. He started to calculate the last time he had picked up his harp. Close on four years, he reckoned. It was not the kind of thing that travelled well.

Rothos was, by now, making his way through a well-known tune. Something from Pelargir, Faramir thought, the place were songs from Gondor and songs from the south met. It didn't sound right. "_Oh!_" hissed Rothos, when he got to the end, and with considerable frustration.

"Try again," said Faramir, softly. But before he had the chance, a voice called out from the hall beyond.

"Faramir? Is that you in there?"

"_Oh Valar," _muttered Faramir. He had forgotten this room was right above his father's study. "Rothos, hand me that thing, right now—" He grabbed the instrument from the boy's hands just in time.

The door swung open and the two cousins stared at the man glowering at them. "Faramir?" said Denethor. "What's going on?" His eye fell on the instrument in his son's hands. "What's this?"

Faramir considered a number of answers to this question, before settling on the one least likely to perjure him in any way. "It's an _oud,_ sir."

The risk with such an answer was that one did sound rather a fool. His father, rolling his eyes, said, "Yes, I can see that. Where did you find it?"

"Well, in here, sir."

The upside to giving responses like this was that one was able to stall for time. The downside was that Father might, at best, snap at one's idiocy, or, at worst, suspect a deliberate attempt to provoke. Nevertheless, Faramir thought, until he was able to ascertain the exact nature of the crime which he and Rothos had inadvertently committed, he intended to keep his young cousin well out of the firing line.

His father eyed him narrowly. "Were you playing it?"

"Me, sir?"

"Yes, Faramir, you. Who else?"

Faramir, pausing to take stock of how this conversation was unfolding and whether there was any hope of an honourable escape, opened his mouth to say – well, he wasn't quite sure yet…

Someone else replied. "There's me," said Rothos. "In case you hadn't noticed."

Denethor turned his head, ever so slightly, to observe the boy sitting on the wooden chest. "You?"

_This_, thought Faramir, _is not going to turn out well_.

"Yes, me. I play the _oud_." Rothos, reaching out to retrieve the blasted thing from his cousin's hands, plucked at the strings again. He scowled. "Only this one isn't behaving as expected!"

"That, I imagine," said his uncle, "is because you are used to the Haradric _oud_. This one is from Khand."

Rothos's head shot up. His eyes gleamed. "From Khand?"

"Look at it more closely," said Denethor. "What can you see? Or not see, more importantly."

After a moment, Rothos said, "No frets."

"No frets."

"Hmm," said Rothos, bending again over the instrument. "That makes life more interesting."

"It requires precision, and a good ear," said Denethor. "Are you capable of that?"

Rothos snorted. _Well, yes!_

"Good. Put your left hand here – yes, good – and the right here. Very good. Now – move that finger along half as much as you would usually…"

Faramir, very quietly, stood up. He crossed the distance between his chair and the exit swiftly. Slipping through the door, he looked back, to see two heads – one dark, one silver – bent over the _oud_. His father was reaching out to correct the positioning of the boy's hands.

"By the way, Faramir," called Denethor, over his shoulder, "in case you're interested, this belonged to your grandmother, Isilmë. She was very proficient on the _oud_."

Isilmë, Denethor's own mother, had died more than thirty years before Faramir had been born. He rarely talked about her. Questions formed on Faramir's lips, but he did not know how to ask them, and he was not sure that any such invitation had in fact been given. He abandoned the attempt. He left, and stood in the corridor, listening to the music, wondering if he might go back to bed. He decided, in the end, that he should not. Instead he went down to the butts for the rest of the morning, placing arrow after arrow faultlessly in the gold.

* * *

**A/N**: For Faramir's early days as captain of the Ithilien Rangers, see _Proof._

_Altariel, 28__th__ December 2019_


	2. The Apprentice

**The Apprentice**

_Minas Tirith, Fourth Age 13_

Some afternoons, racing to do everything that needed to be done before the messages had to go out and trying to ignore the unmistakable signs of a headache, Faramir would remind himself that this was peacetime, that more than a decade had passed since any real threat to life and limb, and that everything would most likely be fine. Then he would get back to what he was doing.

What, really, he would tell himself (as he pressed his fingertips against the bridge of his nose) was there to worry about? No imminent conflagrations; no monstrous army of despair advancing across the Pelennor; neighbouring powers that, if not exactly friendly, had no inclination to threaten Gondor – he himself had, for the most part, negotiated the treaties, not to mention written most of the texts (in two languages). No, there was nothing to worry about… except the vague and persistent feeling, sometimes, that he had missed something small but vitally critical to Gondor's welfare…

This afternoon, he had fled the White Tower, where people for some reason had been treating his closed door as wide open, and retreated to his study at home, in the hope that, left undisturbed for a few hours, he might be able to make some progress on a letter to Lord Irâz, the man within the Haradric court most favourable towards Gondor. Corresponding with Irâz was a laborious process which involved composing a letter sufficiently detailed to be of use while simultaneously vague enough to avoid anything that might incriminate, translating the whole into Haradric, and then writing out the whole wretched missive in the needlessly convoluted script used south of the border. It needed quiet, patience, and concentration. Unfortunately, someone, somewhere in the house, had chosen this afternoon to start learning the _oud_.

Faramir, who could not play the _oud_, nevertheless knew several things about this particular instrument. Firstly, it had belonged to his paternal grandmother, Isilmë, a woman who had died more than thirty years before his birth, but who had been a figure of much conjecture between him and his brother. What, in the name of Mandos, could Denethor's mother possibly have been like? Their father never mentioned her, but then their father was hardly the sort of man to indulge in fond reminiscence, and there was nobody else to ask. Quite how she had come by this _oud_, Faramir had never determined, particularly (this was the second thing he knew about it) as it was not the Haradric version of the instrument with which they were familiar in Gondor, but a much more tricky and fiendish type that had come all the way from Khand. No, he had no idea how, where, when, nor why Isilmë had chosen to learn the instrument in the Khandian style. He had never met the woman.

The third thing that Faramir knew about this particular instrument was that whoever was playing it today was not very good. And the fourth thing he knew was that it was by no means the right accompaniment to writing a complicated and politically sensitive letter to a man who, if Faramir got the word order of his sentences slightly wrong, might find himself in significant personal danger.

Faramir abandoned his work. He came out of his study and stood in the hall glaring up the stairs. Whoever was playing the thing had not – yet – grasped the key difference between this instrument and every other one to which they had been exposed.

"For pity's sake," he said, throwing up his hands in exasperation, "it isn't _hard_! The intervals are half as long as you're used to, that's all!"

(His wife, who, hearing the study door open unexpectedly early, had come out to see what was going on, took one look at his face, rolled her eyes, and began to organise the immediate removal of the bulk of the household back to Emyn Arnen. Their three children – who were witty, intelligent, loving, and their endless delight – were sometimes hard work. Also, they outnumbered their parents.)

The music practice continued. Faramir, taking the steps up two at a time, tracked the racket down to one of the spare rooms, where Léof – eight years old and perhaps the most singular of his three extremely vivid offspring – was sitting on a wooden chest, picking away at the blasted thing.

Faramir stood at the door and watched. After a while, he said, "Léof."

"Mmm?" said the boy.

"Léof, the intervals are half as long as you're used to."

The boy frowned beneath his blond fringe and looked down at the instrument. His expression brightened. "Oh! Yes! That would do it!"

"Also," said his father, "there are no frets."

"Huh. Oh yes. Thank you."

The son went back to his practice. The father, who by now had remembered that everything would most likely be fine, left him to it. He went downstairs, slipped out of the back door, and went for a walk. The following morning, after his family had left for Ithilien, he sat quietly in his study and finished the letter. Then he went up to the spare room. The _oud_ was propped up there. He picked it up, sat down on a nearby chair, and began to play. His fingers were heavy and clumsy. At any other time in his life he would have given up the attempt: _This is a waste of valuable time; I have more important things to do; Father won't like it_… Today, he thought, _I'll get this right if it kills me_.

* * *

_Khand, Fourth Age 26 _

"Vani," she said. "My name is Vani."

"Vani," said Léof, looking back down the alleyway with some trepidation. "It's possible that I might be in a spot of trouble."

She glanced at the instrument slung across his back. "Did they not like your choice of songs?"

"They loved my choice of songs. They didn't love my voice."

"And—?"

"And…" Leof, hearing the running footsteps, pulled the young woman into the shadows. "Vani, have you heard of a city called Minas Tirith?"

"Who hasn't?"

"Would you, by any chance, know how I might find passage there? Quickly?"

"That depends..."

"Depends on what?"

"On whether you need a singer."

He laughed, and they clasped hands. They were married in the Citadel the following spring.

* * *

_Altariel, 29__th__ December 2019_


End file.
